Situating the oral eye in designer capitalism

pp. 21-40

in: Jan Jagodzinski, Visual art and education in an era of designer capitalism, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2010

Abstract

Designer capitalism trades on the capture of affect through screen media to establish a particular sensorium for its own ends. Is there a way for art and its education to avoid this capture? In the broadest sense, this requires a transition from an imaginary based on representation to a non-representational logic as developed by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, who drew on the seminal thoughts of Gregory Bateson, Baruch Spinoza, Henri Bergson, and Friedrich Nietzsche. It seems to me that their more ethical and radical political potentialities as offered in Anti-Oedipus (A-O) and Thousand Plateaus (TP) have been hijacked and subsumed by more conservative 'scientific" proponents of chaos and complexity theory (DeLanda 2006). Guattari's more radical approach still remains in the shadows of Deleuze, while Deleuze's Logic of Sense (1990) and Difference and Repetition (1994) have been given theoretical priority, which is why (perhaps?) there has been a renewed interest in and reappraisal of Anti-Oedipus (Holland 1999; Buchanan 2008) and the continued provocative application of Deleuze<Guattari to politics by John Protevi (2001, 2009) and Brian Massumi. The ontologization of affect, its political manifestations to manipulate the political landscape, has raised strong debate, especially within human geography circles, where there is a strong recognition that the prepersonal corporeal molecular dimension of experience relates to the inhuman, not as some kind of biological or physiological reduction-ism, but as the recognition of the creative forces at play within ethological cartographies that are "more" than human (Doel, 1999; Connolly 2002; Thrift 2005; McCormack 2007; Barnett 2008).